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The Cresset, a journal of commentary on literature, the arts, and public affairs, explores ideas and trends in contemporary culture from a perspective grounded in the Lutheran tradition of scholarship, freedom, and faith while informed by the wisdom of the broader Christian community.

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Mark Noll, Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at
the University of Notre Dame, is a prolific author on the history of North
American Christianity. In 1994, he published The Scandal of the Evangelical
Mind, critiquing the sometimes shallow scholarship and intellectual life of
Evangelicals. In Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind, he turns to the
christological foundations for evangelical thinking and scholarship as a way
forward from the scandal he lamented earlier.

The
book contends that “coming to know Christ provides the most basic possible
motive for pursuing the tasks of human learning” (ix–x). The first chapter
sketches the main biblical assertions about the person and work of Christ as
they came to focus in the early creeds of the church, the Apostles’ and Nicene.
Subsequent chapters begin by selecting key phrases from those creeds, as well
as from the Chalcedonian Creed, as they provide starting and governing points
for the life of the mind. The second and third chapters catalog christological
encouragements to study and suggest “how the Christology of the classic creeds
might guide scholarship” (xi). The fourth chapter shows how Christ’s
substitutionary atonement offers pointers for scholarship-in-general, and the
final three chapters are discipline-specific, on history, science, and biblical
studies.

Noll’s
use of the early creeds offers three advantages: they focus on the centrality
of Christ and the Trinity; they are widely accepted by all branches of
Christianity; and their liturgical use grounds the life of the mind in the
gathered assembly of believers. “The person of Christ and the work of Christ
must, however, be considered in the fullness of Christian faith. The
Trinity—Father,

Son,
and Spirit in the unity of the Godhead—provides the essen­tial, if also deeply
­mysterious, starting point” (ix). This focus on Christ and the Trinity turns
out to be a rich, nuanced foundation for thinking. The ecumenical reach of this
project is enhanced by using classical creeds instead of more recent
“statements of faith” that are characteristic of the evangelical movement.
Although there are rumblings of discontent with the early creeds among
progressive and revisionary Christians, for the most part they are accepted and
widely used to define what is meant by Christian. And, their use in the
standard liturgies of Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant bodies places these
formulations in settings where Christian character and thinking are being
formed by the means of grace: the Word, sacraments, and prayer.

In
chapter three, “Jesus Christ: Guidance for Serious Learning,” Noll develops
guidelines, to flesh out the implications of the Christology of John 1,
Colossians 1, Hebrews 1, and the major creeds for Christians who pursue an
academic vocation. The lordship of Christ over all things leads to four
expectations that inform intellectual life: duality or doubleness, contingency,
particularity, and self-denial. All this shows that Christian intellectual life
“can arise as a natural extension of Christian belief” (45).

Duality
or doubleness: Noll writes that the Chalcedonian Definition—the two natures
of Christ “undergo no confusion, no change, no division, no separation”—leads
to the expectation that Christian scholars “should be predisposed to seek
knowledge about particular matters from more than one angle.” He also sees this
doubleness in Acts 2:23, Nehemiah 2:8, and Psalm 77:19, where biblical authors
recognize “multiple legitimate skeins of cause and effect to explain single
human actions” (46). In successive paragraphs, he discusses affirmations of
doubleness in the writings of Anselm, B. B. Warfield, Gabriel Fackre, and
Robert Palma.

Contingency:
Things happen, not because they have to, but because it worked out that way.
“Contingency means that if we want to find out about the workings of nature,
the reasons why historical events took place... or the motives behind human
actions in the present or in the past, we... must seek out as much evidence as
possible” (50). In support of this, Noll writes that the message of the
apostles was based on their experience of the resurrection, not on the
necessary truths of reason. “To all forms of unbelief, however, the response is
the same: come and see” (52). Empirical reasoning allows for an escape from
pure constructionism or deductive dogmatism; not reasoning downward from what
one knows the Bible must be, but reasoning upward as one actually reads it
(53). Contingency counters “the tendency of academics to trust their own
conclusions instead of letting their ideas be challenged by contact with the
world” (55).

Particularity:
In the tension between modernity and postmodernity, the incarnation establishes
the universality of truth and affirms the perspectival character of truth,
holding “together concrete absolutism and nearly infinite flexibility” (58).
“Because God revealed himself most clearly in a particular set of circumstances
and at a particular time and place, every other particular set of cultural
circumstances takes on a fresh potential importance” (55). Noll cites several
incidents in Acts—linguistic diversity at Pentecost, the acceptance of cultural
diversity at Cornelius’s home, Paul’s comment about God’s making the nations
from one man and setting their times and places (Acts 17)—to support this
principle. He concludes, “The universal meaning of the incarnation both
relativizes and dignifies all other cultural situations” (57). As a liturgical
theologian, I particularly appreciate the implications for the contextualization
of liturgy, with “nearly infinite flexibility” in practicing the classical,
universal ordo.

Self-denial:
A five-year-old daughter of two friends has been learning about worship and, as
her father told me, “is just aware enough to be liturgically intolerant.” The
life of the mind is similarly strewn with temptations to hubris. “Before the
mysteries of the incarnation, intellectuals who realize how much their own work
depends on Christ’s work simply accept that all intellectual endeavors are limited....
[T]o grasp that scholars are justified by faith and not by their scholarship
can also have a tremendously liberating consequence for learning itself”
(61–62). Similarly, membership in the body of Christ where all are called to
equally important service helps the intellectual to maintain the proper
humility. In my experience, coffee conversations with techies, musicians,
secretaries, and social workers—or Bible studies with the same mix—help one to
respect the varied gifts of the body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12:12–31).

In
the final chapters, Noll explores how an evangelical understanding of Christ’s
saving work provides a canopy for the study of history, science, and the Bible.
For Noll’s own discipline, the creeds’ summary of the history of redemption
gives him a place to stand as he considers the nature of historical knowledge
(neither postivistic modernism nor relativistic postmodernism) and the doctrine
of providence applied to historical writing. “The same creedal Christianity
that banishes historical skepticism also administers a powerful check to blithe
overconfidence about the reach of historical knowledge” (82). Historical
research can discover truth, but the writing always reflects local
circumstances; only God knows it all. Although God’s providence guides all
events, our ability to understand the means by which God rules is limited both
by our finiteness and our flaws.

For
science, Noll provides a survey of the religion-science engagement since the
sixteenth century, showing that on both sides there are deeply entrenched
convictions, attitudes, and assumptions. To move beyond the impasse, he offers
a case study from the writings of Princeton theologian B. B. Warfield (110–16).
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Warfield engaged the
thinking of Darwin, distinguishing between Darwinism as a cosmological theory
and evolution as a series of explanations about natural development, denying
the former and accepting the probability of the latter.

For
biblical studies, Noll notes two brief but crucial phrases in the creeds: “in
accordance with the Scriptures” (Nicea) and “as the prophets taught”
(Chalcedon). The Bible’s primary function is to tell the story of the “kingdom
inaugurated in, by, with, and under Jesus Christ” (126). His case study here is
Peter Enns’s christotelic hermeneutic and Enns’s use of Warfield’s analogy
between the incarnation of Christ (Chalcedon again) and Scripture’s full
humanity and divinity (132–145). Noll’s treatment of Enns’s proposals (Enns, Incarnation
and Inspiration, 2005) is calm, thoughtful, and nuanced. Noll concludes,
“Stressing the capacity of revelation to unite humanity and divinity in perfect
integration puts believing scholars on the path to intellectual insight” (145).

In
a postscript, Noll asks, “how fares the ‘Evangelical Mind’?” He is now “more
hopeful than despairing, more attuned to possibilities than to problems” (153).
He goes on to note ten hopeful signs: in evangelical colleges, in pluralistic
universities, in seminaries, in cooperation between evangelical and Roman
Catholic scholars, in philanthropic support, in the renaissance of Christian
philosophy, in the sciences, in publishing, in contacts with the Two-Thirds
world, and in the impact of Evangelicals on the broader academy. All in all,
this is a most satisfying book, the fruit of years of careful scholarship and
following Noll’s own principles. This is the kind of book where the reader can
agree or disagree without feeling he or she is in an unpleasant argument.